Slowly, she looked up at Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov. Her lips did not move, but he understood, and his thin, handsome face went as white as a soiled handkerchief. The cavalier of the streets saw her face as she approached. She flung the note at him, so that it fell from his jacket to his feet. She passed him. But fingers swiftly clutched her arm, so that it hurt. “That,” he said harshly, “will teach a lovely lady to love scum. I intended that it should. He and I arranged the _coup_, ages ago. But when I saw you the first time, in Hampstead, I sickened. That is why I was so beastly, that you should hate me as much as I hated myself. _Le coup est nul_, I told Shuvarov after that. Since then your face has haunted me. So I did this--to cure you of your silly infatuation for a man who would eat into your life like a foul little worm into a lovely fruit. God, how you could ever have liked that lousy, half-baked, professional Russian! I saw him to-day, and saw that he still had the note with the red mark on it--this!” And he ground his heel on the note on the pavement. Tighter he held her arm, and he scowled into her face. She thought of the wet-white she would have to use on her arm to hide the bruises of his fingers. “You’re hurting me!” she cried. “I know. I have sinned against you,” he said, “but you have done worse. You have sinned against yourself. Now go, and sin no more. And you’d better go damn quick else you’ll be very late for dinner and the old K.C. will get cross.” “_You_ to talk of sin!” she cried, and laughed. “Naturally, Fay Avalon. For only Satan can rebuke sin with authority.” “Oh, pouf!” she laughed. “You are sentimental then!” “Hell!” snapped the cavalier of the streets. “I am in love!” And as he swept off his dilapidated hat she could not help a thought that a plume would wave more becomingly from that particular hat than from any other hat she knew or would ever know. Romance.... “Oh, dear!” sighed Mrs. Avalon. “Good-bye.” But the cavalier was already only a distant shadow in the street. VIII: MAJOR CYPRESS GOES OFF THE DEEP END I This story has no point. No story that has anything to do with Hugo Cypress could have a point, for Hugo is an utterly pointless man. Dear Hugo.... I have known him since he was so high, and as I was also so high, I know him well. I could tell you of many little happenings, just to show you the sort of man he was, but one in particular, a martial one, vividly occurs to me. It was in the third year of the war, and I had been shoved into the War Office, because of a personal application of that great scientific truth to the effect that two things cannot be in the same place at once, particularly if one of them happens to be a German shell; and, one day, Hugo called. His arm was in a sling and a light was in his eye. Dear Hugo.... “Show me,” said Hugo, “a man who will give me a job of work.”